Thani Oruvan is a Tamil movie from 2015. It stars Jayam Ravi, Nayanthara and Arvind Swamy. The core movie is about a policing student discovering a pattern of crimes that leads to one ultimate villain. It has a very Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty feel or even the Joker and Batman. Jayam Ravi is the police office in training and Arvind Swamy is the ultimate big bad.
The movie is so great because both of them respect each other immensely and its almost a thrill for each to do things to the other. They aren't doing it to be just good or bad but because it is stimulating them in some other way. It's crazy how much love they seem to have for each other. I'm sure there's hate but its a certain kind of admiration that gets really going.
The core theme is that you can hide big things by doing many smaller unrelated things. The first event of the movie is a child getting arrested for killing a man. This makes it to page 1 of the newspaper. In that same newspaper, on page 6 is a story about a man being made a minister. Completely unrelated. Except the child on page 1 was the son of the minister of page 6. This is caught by Jayam Ravi as a child and he realizes what it means. This entire thing is his whole personality. Every moment he spends awake is looking at patterns around him and in the world. He is constantly seen with headphones, but it's always more news. Even when he's talking to his friends he is still keenly aware of what's going on behind them. He is obsessed with finding the threads that connect things and it comes across very well.
Arvind Swamy's character is very much the same way. Every crime he commits, everything he does always has layers. He uses everything and anything to his benefit and he spends all his time thinking about this. The movie fulyl embraces the idea that to be good at something you need to focus on it singlemindedly. There should be nothing else. We see multiple characters have this behavior and it is neat to see the different parallels that arise out of it.
This is the second time I watched this movie and it has gotten better since the last time. It also holds up quite well. Like most tamil movies the supporting cast isn't as great and the love story is a bit tacked on. It's fine and doesn't get grating but you could cut it and lose nothing. The love story between Arvind Swamy's character and Shilpa was great and much better. Much deeper there.
This movie also has one of my favourite soundtracks and the music is great. Everything fits so well together in this movie.
One of my favourite songs and music videos: